Doesn’t seem as if there’s much pluralism in large-foundation employees’ reported political contributions.
At some of the nation’s largest philanthropies, the employees clearly tilt towards the left, based on their political giving. An AI-assisted analysis of publicly available data about contributions reported to the Federal Election Commission by individuals identifying 19 large philanthropic institutions as their employers found that of the Democratic- or Republican-classified contributions to candidates, 97.23% went to Democrats.
Since done by AI, there may be mistakes in the compilations. For example, several other large foundations captured in the search, such as Hilton, registered no activity—which may seem strange—and are thus not among the 19 in the compilation. Nor do the search results document any specific types of recipients it may have filtered out or its methodology for reconciling differences in how a specific employer name was listed, which may differ among those contributors doing the reporting. It does seem to me, however, as if any errors or complicating methodologies would have to be quite substantial to meaningfully change the overall picture.
As shown in the table below, employess of only one institution, the Lilly Endowment, tilted towards Republicans—but the amount of money given to them was so low, $1,731, that it does not make a dent in the big picture. (It should also be noted that much of Lilly’s grantmaking focuses on community projects that are not ideological.)
In the case of 13 foundations, 100% of all employees’ reported donations classified as going to a major-party candidate went to Democrats. The total amount given by just this segment of our sample is well more than $1.5 million.
Gates Foundation employees had the biggest sum of contributions to Republicans, totaling $65,881. But that represented just over five percent of Gates employees’ total political giving.
Now, it is possible that foundation employees who want to support Republicans simply do not list their employer when making contributions. If they do not, the recipients are supposed to use their best efforts to collect and disclose it. While missing employer information may affect the completeness of an employer-based search, I have my doubts that this explains the partisan disproportionality here.
The Council on Foundations and other philanthropic groups try to make the case that philanthropy is pluralistic—not politically biased or very ideological. But even for the thousands of small local and family foundations in the United States, that claim may not be true. Open Secrets data for the past two decades indicate a 4-to-1 preference for Democratic candidates and related entities among all foundations in its database.
AI gives us the ability to develop in-depth analyses of complicated topics in just a few minutes. The data in this piece was pulled together in about 15 minutes using Perplexity. The capacity to do this sort of digging into the workings of philanthropy offers intriguing possibilities, moving towards true transparency. As such, we are entering a new age of accountability in the nonprofit world.
The politicized nature of many foundations is a case in point. When you look at the biggest players, the tilt to the left is very clear—with 97%+ of the Democratic- or Republican-classified contributions going to Democrats. Given this decidedly lopsided political orientation, it should be no wonder that the grantmaking of these institutions is progressive, with a few outliers like Lilly. It is also not surprising that Republican policymakers have a jaundiced view of Big Philanthropy.
